Friedberg left Google at 25 in 2005, walking away from stock worth a couple million dollars without full funding.
“I left all my stock options on the table, all my RSUs I'd been given. It was worth a couple million dollars, and I was 25 years old back in 2005.”
Friedberg notes Google grew from $20B to $100B quarterly revenue and $2T market cap under Pichai's decade as CEO.
“Under your tenure as CEO, the stock has gone up by four and a half x to a $2,000,000,000,000 market cap today. You've grown revenue from 20,000,000,000 a quarter to nearly 100,000,000,000 a quarter.”
Friedberg states Google's search ad revenue runs at $200 billion annually out of $360 billion total revenue.
“the core search business, which the ad revenue in search is about a $200,000,000,000 run rate out of $360,000,000,000 of your total revenue, most of your profits.”
Friedberg recalls Google built shipping container data centers twenty years ago that only needed water and power.
“As long as you had access to water and power, it could connect to the internet and you could scale data center capacity all over the world. That was twenty years ago.”
Friedberg describes Google's book-scanning project as exemplifying leadership through big audacious goals that challenge teams.
“And those big thinking, those big ideas, those big audacious concepts, as a framing for the team, really, I think personified what I consider to be true leadership in an organization of people,”
Friedberg recounts Larry Page and Sergey Brin calling third-party cookies evil in early Google days, proving prescient.
“Wesley and I kind of started working together after that because the first thing Larry and Sergei said to me was that's evil. Third party cookies are evil.”
Friedberg says Google Analytics drove $500 million in additional AdWords revenue within a year of the $25 million acquisition.
“Within a year, I think we had shown through Hal Varian, who was our chief economist, we had demonstrated that Google Analytics increased AdWords revenue by $500,000,000 because so many advertisers were using it to improve their websites and make the conversions better that they were spending more on AdWords.”